Sign Language Automation

Abstract

Sign language is a visual gesture language. Deaf people use sign language as their main source for communication. They use their hands, face and arms for conveying thoughts and meanings. Sign language is not having any written form and generating signs using video approach is very expensive, so, sign animation is best solution. For performing animation from text or speech, machine translation is used. Indian Sign Language is a linguistically under-investigated language. Research on Indian Sign Language linguistics also limited because of lack of Indian Sign Language knowledge and the unavailability of such tools which provide any education for Indian Sign Language. In this thesis, sign language generation system for Punjabi language is proposed. It takes Punjabi sentence as input, process it and generates sign animation corresponding to sentence. For generating animation, it parses the sentence; extracts root words from the sentence and generate HamNoSys corresponding to root words. Then HamNoSys is converted into SiGML and animation is generated. HamNoSys generation system is developed in this thesis. It takes word as input and generates HamNoSys corresponding to inputted word. Generated HamNoSys can be saved into its database and used by sign language generation system for Punjabi language.